NIGERIAN TEENAGER SOLD INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY IN LIBYA!!!

Her heart skipped a beat. Could it be that fortune had finally shone its face on her impoverished family? That she would finally leave the ‘hellhole’ she called home? “So, I won’t have to pay anything here,” she naively quipped, trying to process the enormity of the offer that had been so coyly presented. “Nothing. You will, of course, pay back once you reach Europe.” His toothless smile bordered on benign. But desperation dimmed the warning bells ringing within. Miss Beauty John accepted and the spirited 19-year-old prepared the scanty belongings she had in Akwa-Ibom State, Nigeria, for the ‘trip of a lifetime’.

It was 2015. Beauty tearfully kissed her mum and younger siblings farewell, promising she would call upon her arrival in Europe. The car first went to Kano State, where she was roughly pushed into another vehicle with several other intrepid travellers. Their destination was Agadez, Niger. As the vehicle hastily traversed the desert terrain at midnight, Beauty plucked up the courage to ask about the plane she would board to Europe. “Shut up, girl” was the only answer she got. There was no going back. In Agadez, Beauty was placed inside a Hilux vehicle alongside almost 20 others. A tortuous four-day journey through the Sahara Desert lay ahead. The sun beat relentlessly, the young Nigerian clinging onto a wooden stick as the vehicle hurtled through the endless dunes at breakneck speeds.

When Beauty arrived in Libya, a ‘connection-man’ was awaiting her. But the conditions on which she set out on her journey were about to be radically revised. She would have to ‘pay her ticket’ to Europe, he stoically informed her. How? By selling her own body for sex. Beauty convulsed, blurting out that this was not she travelled for. “That’s not my business; you belong to me now,” he retorted, striking her to the ground with a vicious blow. Beauty had been sold into sexual slavery – by her own countrymen. It took the teenager almost six months to raise the requisite money to ‘buy’ her freedom – an equivalent of N400,000. “I slept with between 20 to 25 men every day,” she winningly reminisced of her days in prostitution. Innocence robbed in the cruellest, most callous of fashions.

What transpired in the next 1,000 days are beyond what words can adequately convey. Beauty spent three long years in Libya – which she described as “hell on earth” – longing for the day she would ‘cross over’ to Europe. She worked as a cleaner in a hospital to support herself, saving up her meagre income to secure her journey. Finally setting sail in a makeshift rubber dinghy in late 2018, along with almost 100 others, Beauty had not even reached International Waters when their ship was flagged down by the Libyan coastguard. She was promptly imprisoned and finally repatriated back to Nigeria. “I came back with literally nothing,” she stated, adding that the clothes on her back were provided courtesy of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). “I wasted three years of my life in Libya,” Beauty concluded. “But God kept me alive for a purpose – so my life can be a lesson to others. I plead with my fellow Nigerian youth not to take such a journey and end up in prostitution, like I did.”

Beauty was among the 60 Nigerians deported from Libya who came to The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations (SCOAN) on Friday 14th September 2018, where they were given N2m by Prophet T.B. Joshua and Emmanuel TV Partners to help start their lives afresh in Nigeria.